Stephen P. Johnson

A fifth generation Texan, Stephen Johnson worked his way through college as a construction worker and became a newspaper reporter upon his 1976 graduation from the University of Houston. Stephen initially worked for the Texas City Daily Sun and the Temple Daily Telegram near Fort Hood, TX. In 1979 he began a 20-year career at the Houston Chronicle. While assigned to cover Fort Hood during the 1970s, Stephen lived in the field with the ragtag Army units of the period and won recognition for covering the troubled "Hollow Army" of the post-Vietnam era. During the 1980s, he acquired numerous awards for his groundbreaking work in exposing shortcomings in the public mental health care system serving the seriously mentally ill. He explained that chronic "homelessness" was not necessarily a matter of economics but one of serious psychiatric illness poorly served by an inadequate public mental health care system. This work led Stephen to investigate starvation, fire deaths, abuse, rape and financial exploitation of the disabled and the mentally ill in unlicensed care homes commonly called "boarding homes." Despite other responsibilities, Stephen maintained a focus on military and defense matters, believing America would eventually find itself again sending troops into combat. He's traveled to such places as Central America, Saudi Arabia and to domestic military posts and bases to observe America's military forces. In 1989 he wrote on the state of readiness and training of various Army units and pronounced the "Hollow Army" a thing of the past. Soon after, U.S. military performance in Panama and during the Gulf War vindicated his view. Because he observed the development of the U.S. Army's AirLand Battle Doctrine during the 1970s while covering the U.S. Army post at Fort Hood, Stephen was able to foretell, with great precision, how the 1991 Gulf War would be conducted while accurately predicting low coalition casualties in a conflict of short duration. Stephen has also reported on the gritty elements of urban life, having been to dozens of homicide scenes, numerous aviation mishaps and more criminal and civil trials than he can recall. A chance phone call to the Houston Chronicle newsroom in 1987 by a former USS Scorpion crew member introduced him to the story of the ill-fated fast attack submarine. Stephen eventually wrote several stories about this enigmatic disaster mishap during the mid-1990s. Deeply moved that America had mostly forgotten about this unexplained disaster and the men it killed, Stephen was determined to write the definitive book about this misunderstood calamity and the U.S. Navy's bitter internal controversy over what caused the Scorpion disaster. What resulted was a unique look "under the hood" of the U.S. Navy's troubled efforts to maintain its nuclear attack submarines at the height of the Cold War. In 2000, Stephen left newspaper journalism to write books full time and in 2002 began research on Silent Steel: The Mysterious Death of the Nuclear Attack Sub USS Scorpion for Wiley & Sons Publishing. Silent Steel is Stephen's third book. He presently splits his time between Atlanta, GA and Bloomfield NJ.